TCS, which counts RBI, SBI and a host of financial institutions as its customers, had to work on a war footing to try and smooth the inevitable bumps.Jochelle Mendonca | ET Bureau | December 02, 2016, 08:51 IST

Late on the evening of November 8, 10 executives at Tata Consultancy Services got on a conference call to discuss how to ensure that their banking customers will be able to comply with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation announcement.

TCS, which counts RBI, the State Bank of India and a host of financial institutions as its customers, had to work on a war footing to try and smooth the inevitable bumps that could occur when over 80% of a country’s currency loses its validity almost overnight.

“The first thing we did on the conference call was to make a list of the top-five priorities that had to go into work right away. Then we had to put some work we were doing with the banks on hold, to make everyone focus on changing the back-end systems to put in things like withdrawal limits,” Ravi Viswanathan, president of TCS’ Growth Markets business, told ET.

Viswanathan said that changes like putting in withdrawal limits were done in such a way that they could be modified with minimal additional effort going forward. But new policy changes required additional effort to alter the banking systems.

“Making it configurable has helped because the withdrawal amounts have changed a few times over the past few weeks. But when the marriage withdrawal limit was announced, that required more effort because that change was not configurable,” Viswanathan said.

The company also had to reconfigure the machines carried by banking correspondents, who work in farflung villages unserved by permanent bank branches. The company is also working with some clients on ‘queuebusting’ solutions to ease the long waits to withdraw money for customers. TCS has had to bring in 100 additional employees into its banking projects to institute the changes; it also refocused existing banking employees who were working on less urgent projects.

Viswanathan said the company had clocked 1,000 person days of work in just the first 10-15 days since demonetisation was announced. TCS is not alone in needing extra help to manage demonetisation. Bank employees have worked late nights and weekends and, in some cases, retired workers have been brought back to manage the rush of work.

To make it easier for bank heads to understand how much money was flowing into their accounts and how much was leaving, TCS created a mobile app that pulled in the data from the core-banking systems.

“Now they can see on an hourly, daily basis exactly what is happening with the money in their system. We could have done physical reports, but we thought we should make this digital,” Viswanathan said. The digital platform took about a week to create, post demonetisation.

Experts on IT systems at banks say that managing the back end at banks is crucial in the current situation.

“No bank could have been prepared for this. And, unlike foreign banks, banks in India are yet to adopt a high level of automation. Some of the smaller banks do not have very sophisticated online banking systems. Even depositing notes in ATMs is a concern because the machines are old and there are concerns about security,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of IT consultancy Greyhound Research.

TCS, Bengaluru-based rival Infosys and Oracle Financial Services Software run the core-banking systems for a large number of Indian lenders. Viswanathan added that TCS had the bandwidth to handle the changes that would be needed and that future steps would involve boosting the banks’ digital capabilities.

“Most of the banks have already started building their digital systems with mobile wallets and so on. Going forward, the work will be to add functionality and create infrastructure for the higher level of utilisation that will follow,” he added.